1. Wang Guangyi is known as a leader of the new art movement that started in China after 1989, and for his Great Criticism series of paintings, which use images of propaganda from the Cultural Revolution and contemporary brand names from western advertising.
Wang Guangyi was born in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province in 1957.
Wang Guangyi graduated from the oil painting department of the academy in 1984.
Wang Guangyi's work is considered in China to be in the Political Pop genre; some consider this an error.
The North Pole is a recurring theme in Wang Guangyi's early works; it is seen not in relation to its geographic characteristics, but as a symbolic place where a new faith is born, in which the individual must deal principally with himself, but without freeing himself from the social.
Wang Guangyi's objective consisted in elaborating a style that deviated from that of classic art, an expressive strategy which derived from his reading of Gombrich.
Wang Guangyi began this cycle in 1990 and ended it in 2007 when he became convinced that its international success would compromise the original meaning of the works, namely that political and commercial propaganda are two forms of brainwashing.
Wang Guangyi perceives a well-established climate of reciprocal suspicion and looming danger, which ripened during the Cold War and still persists today, even if it has lost the oppressiveness born of forced indoctrination.
Some critics claim that Wang Guangyi "has lost his artistic ingenuity, gives in to the market, and has become dependent on repeating his already successful works".
Wang Guangyi has had a number of solo exhibitions, including:.